Posts Tagged ‘the walking dead: 400 days’

How do you follow a series as groundbreaking/tear-jerking as The Walking Dead: Season One? Well, with The Walking Dead: Season Two of course, but that’s not ready yet. In the meantime, Telltale has re-purposed its old ZomboTech to create a very different sort of story – or rather, set of stories. The Walking Dead: 400 Days focuses on five characters and a single truck stop over the course of, well, 400 days. The idea is to create a sort of “bridge” between seasons, but it’s no flabby gut of filler. 400 Days is more of a rapid-fire storytelling experiment set in Walking Dead’s universe, a sort of palette cleanser for Telltale after many more than 400 days with Lee and Clem. But does it succeed, or has Telltale’s misery drooling maw of human suffering finally bit off more than it can chew? Here’s wot I think.

(Note: I’ve made sure to avoid specific spoilers of real consequence, but I do discuss character motivations and story structure. I don’t think this one warrants a spoiler warning, but I thought I’d offer a heads-up all the same.)

The last time we saw The Walking Dead it was lying in a pool of blood, waiting to rise again as some sort of brain-hungry second season. The bastard game hadn’t so much jerked the tears from my eyes as attached wild horses to the ducts and had the muscular beasts run toward the horizon for a couple of hours. It’s still not clear precisely how the two seasons will be connected but the announcement of 400 Days, a new episode that will act as a bridge between the two seasons, will surely provide some answers. That’s what bridges do. There are probably some clues in the trailer below, which contains at least one character who has appeared previously.